A portion of the skeptical class of the
community are intelligent and somewhat
candid, but unfortunately are not
familiar with the subjects about which
they talk, and hence are led into most
egregious errors.

There is, perhaps, no statement more
current among infidels at large, whether
of high or low degree, than that the
canon of New Testament Scripture was
defined and settled by a vote of the bishops
assembled at the Council of Nice,
in the year A.D. 325.
Over and over
has this assertion been made and reiterated.
And many infidels have settled it
as one of the articles of their faith, and
upon this basis proceed to deride Christians
for their folly and superstition.

I recollect meeting this story in Marlboro',
Mass., where it had been written
out by a leading infidel, and printed in
a newspaper.
The writer declared that
this account of the origin of the New
Testament rested upon the authority of
Papias, an early Christian bishop.
I
replied that there was one little difficulty
about that story, namely, that
Papias had been dead and buried 150
years or more before the Council of
Nice was ever heard of; but suggested
that, as they might have obtained their
information from "the spirits," the fact
of his death was no insuperable difficulty
in the way of their theory.
The
skeptic arose to explain, and said the
person alluded to was not the right
Papias, but that the one he referred to
was an "obscure Christian bishop of the
fourth century."
The writer replied
that he was no doubt very "obscure,"
so obscure that no one had ever heardof him before or since.

It seemed desirable, however, that
this statement about Papias should be
looked up, and so, turning to a well-known
infidel book written by an English
author, and published at the office
of what has long been the leading infidel
paper of America, these words were
found:

"The following fact, mentioned by
Pappius in his 'Synodicum of the
Council of Nice,' is however, worth all
the preceding, valuable and curious
though they be.
Pappius informs us of
the manner in which the true Gospels
were selected from the false at that memorable
council: 'This was done,'
says he, 'by placing all the books undera communion table, and upon the prayers
of the council, the inspired books
jumped upon the table! while the false
ones remained under!' What a test of truth! What a proof of inspiration!
It
is quite a stirring argument.
Who,
after this, will venture to doubt the authenticity
of the Scriptures?....And if these councils are not to be depended
upon, we have no means of
ascertaining which of the immense
numbers of Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and
Revelations, are really genuine, or if
any are so.
All is confusion, doubt, and
uncertainty.
A curious state of things
when a book is said to be of divine origin."

Similar statements are found in numerous
infidel publications, and are received
with unquestioning confidence
by infidels who taunt Christians with
their credulity in believing the Bible.
This story, as quoted above, was referred
to as "an historical record translated
from the Greek," in an article
published in a Boston infidel paper.

Briefly stated, the Council of Nice
did nothing of the kind during its sessions,
as this question did not come up
for consideration there.
This foolish
story occurs in a book entitled "Synodikon,"
which was printed from an old
Greek manuscript, first discovered by
John Pappus, a German theologian,
but written no one knows when, where,
or by whom; but as it refers to events
which occurred in the year A.D. 869,
we know it must have been written at
least 544 years after the Council of Nice
was held.
Pappus probably discovered
this romancing old document in some
library, and printed it as a curiosity;
and infidels have swallowed it whole,
as if it were the authentic history of an
eye-witness.

We propose now to show briefly, the
absurdity and falsity of the assertion
that the New Testament was concocted
by a pack of priests, or an ecclesiastical
council.

Robert Phillip's "Life, Times, and
Missionary Enterprises of John Campbell,"
the African Missionary traveler,
contains (pp. 215-216) the following
anecdote by Mr. Campbell:

I remember distinctly an interesting
anecdote referring to the late Sir David
Dalrymple, better known to literary
men abroad by his title of Lord Hailes,
a Scottish judge.
I had it from the
late Rev. W. Buchanan, one of the ministers
of Edinburgh.
I took such interest
in it that, though it must be about
fifty years ago since he told it, I think I
can almost relate it in Mr. Buchanan's
words:

"I was dining sometime ago with a
literary party at old Mr. Abercrombie's,
father of General Abercrombie who was
slain in Egypt at the head of the British
army, and spending the evening together.
A gentleman present put a
question which puzzled the whole company.
It was this: 'Supposing all the
New Testaments in the world had been
destroyed at the end of the third century,
could their contents have been recovered
from the writings of the first
three centuries?'

"The question was novel to all, and
no one even hazarded a guess in answer
to the inquiry.
About two months
after this meeting, I received a note
from Lord Hailes, inviting me to breakfast
with him next morning.
He had
been one of the party.
During breakfast
he asked me if I recollected the
curious question about the possibility of
recovering the contents of the New
Testament from the writings of the first
three centuries.

"'I remember it well,' said I, 'and
have thought of it often, without being
able to form any opinion of conjecture
on the subject.'

"'Well,' said Lord Hailes, 'that question
quite accorded with the turn or
taste of my antiquarian mind.
On returning
home, as I knew I had all the
writings of those centuries, I began
immediately to collect them, that I
might set to work on the arduous task
as soon as possible.' Pointing to a
table covered with papers, he said,
'There have I been busy for these two
months, searching for chapters, half-chapters,
and sentences of the New
Testament, and have marked down what
I have found, and where I found it, so
that any person may examine and see
for himself.
I have actually discovered
the whole New Testament from those
writings, except seven (or eleven)
verses, (I forgot which,) which satisfied
me that I could discover them also.
'Now,' said he, 'here was a way in
which God concealed or hid the treasure
of his Word, that Julian, the apostate
emperor, and other enemies of Christ
who tried to extirpate the gospel from
the world, never would have thought of;
and though they had, they never could
have effected their destruction.'

"The labor of effecting this feat must
have been immense; for the gospels
and epistles would not be divided into
chapters and verses as they are now.
Much must have been effected by help
of a concordance.
And having been
judge for many years, a habit of minute
investigation must have been formed in
his mind."

The Ante-Nicene Library, published
by T. & T. Clark, of Edinburgh, comprises
some twenty-four octavo volumes,
averaging about five hundred
pages each.
In these 12,000 octavo
pages of printed matter, which stand on
a shelf by my side as I write, are comprised
nearly all the extant writings of
some fifteen or twenty of the most eminent
Christian authors who lived before the year A.D. 325, when the Council of
Nice was convened.
One of these volumes
also contains such remains of
those spurious, uncanonical and fictitious
Gospels, Acts, etc., as have come
down to us from early ages.
In these
twelve thousand pages, all of which are
accessible to skeptics in the English
translations, and which can be compared
with the originals by those who are [R484 : page 7] competent to do so, will be found an
avalanche of evidence upon the question
of the origin of the New Testament
Scriptures.

These men, some of whom were contemporary
with the Apostles, and others
who, as their immediate successors,
were well acquainted with their associates
and contemporaries, give in these
writings the most positive and unmistakable
evidence as to the New Testament
books which they received, and
as to the estimation in which those
books were held.
They quote passage
after passage and page after page of
the same Scriptures that are quoted to-day
and read in every Christian assembly.
They quoted the books which we
quote; they quoted them as we quote
them; they received them as we receive
them, and this, long before the
Council of Nice or any other council
had anything to say about the canon of
the Scriptures.

Polycarp, who was martyred A.D. 155
or 156, after having served Christ
eighty-six years, and who was, during
some thirty years of his long Christian
life, contemporary with the Apostle John,
whose disciple he was, quotes in his
epistle to the Philippians, nearly forty
passages from our New Testament;
Justin Martyr, who wrote about A.D.
140, or some forty years after the decease
of the Apostle John, quotes again
and again the very words which we
now read in the New Testament; and
in the writings of Irenaeus, A.D. 178;
Clement A.D. 194; Tertullian, A.D. 200;
and Origen, A.D. 230, are to be found
8,728 quotations from the New Testament,
including every book which we accept as canonical.*

*TERTULLIAN, in the thirty-sixth chapter of
his work, "Against Heretics," written about A.D.
200, when the parchment writings of the apostles,
being less than one hundred and fifty years
old, should, with ordinary care, have been in
perfect preservation, thus speaks concerning the
authentic writings of the apostles, then read in
the churches: "Come, now, you who would indulge
a better curiosity, if you would apply it to
the business of your salvation, run over the apostolic
churches, in which the very chairs of the
apostles are still pre-eminent in their places, in
which their own authentic writings are read, uttering the voice and representing the face of
each of them severally.
Achaia is very near you,
in which you find Corinth.
Since you are not
far from Macedonia, you have Philippi, you
have the Thessalonians.
Since you are able to
cross to Asia, you get Ephesus.
Since, moreover,
you are close upon Italy, you have Rome,
from whence comes, even into our hands, the
very authority" [of the apostles].

Dr. Alexander Keith, in the sixth
chapter of his "Demonstration of the
Truth of the Christian Religion," records
the number of quotations from
the New Testament which can be found
in works which are still extant, by the
writer whom we have named.
He reports
seven hundred and sixty-seven
(767) passages quoted by Irenaeus, from
every book in the New Testament except
the third epistle of John and the
epistle of Jude; three hundred and
eighty-nine (389) passages quoted by
Clement from every book except the
epistle of James and the second and
third epistles of John, and the epistle of
Jude; eighteen hundred and two (1802)
passages, or, if repetitions are included,
more than three thousand passages,
quoted by Tertullian, from every book
in the New Testament except the epistle
to James, the third of John, the second
of Peter, and the epistle of Jude; while
the works of Origen yet extant,
contain five thousand seven hundred
and sixty-five (5,765) quotations from
the New Testament, including every
book contained therein, and excludingall of the so-called apocryphal books,about which infidels sometimes talk sofreely. Many works of Origen and
other authors of those times have
perished, but it is probable that if Origen's
entire writings had been preserved,
if the New Testament had been lost, it
could have been reconstructed from
them alone.

These authors which we have named
comprise but a portion of the authors
who wrote before the Council of Nice;
but these are sufficient to settle forever
this question of the authenticity of the
New Testament Scriptures.

The fact that councils, at a later date,
published to the world lists of books
which they received as of divine authority,
may be important to the council,
but is of no importance to the books
themselves.
A town meeting or a village
caucus might publish to the world
the volumes they receive as the statutes
of the state or the general laws of the
nation, but their publication of the fact
has no possible connection with the authorityof those laws. If they receive
them as authoritative, well and good; if
they do not receive them, other people
do; and the government is abundantly
able to enforce them.
So this talk
about councils and priests concocting
the New Testament out of a jumbled-up
lot of doubtful and questionable
books, is an evidence of that skeptical
credulity which is so abundant among infidels as a class.The Armory.